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Windows 2008 R2

Today I received a question from a customer who wanted to send “Large” message to all XenApp users in the farm. They asked me what the maximum number of characters was that you can send to a user. I honestly did not have a clue and answered to the client that I was not aware of any limitation but that I did not have any problems even with longer messages. The customer was happy with my answer and did send its “Large” message to their XenApp 6 sessions.

The question got stuck in my mind and I decided I had to find out if there were limitations. So I prepared a 1000 character sentence and send it with Citrix Delivery Console, result was the message popped up to the session as it supposed to. So I tried a 5000 character message and it did not pop-up.

1000 characters,No problems both CDC as Send-XASessionMessage cmdlet

2000 characters,No problems both CDC as Send-XASessionMessage cmdlet

3000 characters,No problems both CDC as Send-XASessionMessage cmdlet

4000 characters,No problems both CDC as Send-XASessionMessage cmdlet

5000 characters, both CDC as Send-XASessionMessage cmdlet the message did not arrive.

After some narrowing down, the maximum character in a message send with:

Citrix Delivery Console = 4055

Send-XASessionMessage= 4094

I’m not sure why the limit is not the same, but that the conclusion I ended up with. So if you send a message to your user, Keep it short 😉

While building a deployment sequence for a XenApp 6 farm using SCCM, I ran into the problem that the unattended install of the PVS Target Device (5.6 SP1) succeeds but after after creating a VHD file using “XenConvert P2VHD” and booting the newly created vDisk the Provisioned Server crashes with a BSOD 0x0000007b (inaccessible boot device).

After some investigation on the source machine I noticed the “Citrix Virtual Hard Disk Enumerator PVS” device did not install correctly and displayed an yellow exclamation mark in Device Manager (devmgmt.msc). After searching the citrix forums I ran into a thread in which the others experienced the same problem.

Unfortunatly a real solution is not provided in within the thread (other than a manual installation). So digging down the internet I found the solution for this problem. Somehow the drivers files are not transferred to the “%windir%\System32\Driver” folder during unattended (SCCM/Wisdom) installation. Copy CFsDep2*.* files from “C:\Program Files\Citrix\Provisioning Services\drivers” to “%windir%\System32\Driver” afterwards you can install you can install the PVS Target Device client unattended by running “PVS_Device_x64.exe /S /v /qn”

After the installation the exclamation mark has disappeared, a newly created vDisk booted successfully.